


the quickening dead

by cygnes



Category: American Psycho - All Media Types
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-27
Updated: 2016-06-27
Packaged: 2018-07-18 11:58:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7314334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cygnes/pseuds/cygnes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They're dead, or they aren't. Either way, they won't leave Patrick alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the quickening dead

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted [here](http://manzanas-amargas.tumblr.com/post/144325054335/i-would-be-interested-to-see-how-patrick-would) on my tumblr, for the prompt "I would be interested to see how patrick would handle either zombies or ghosts, seeing how much he gets bamboozled by the possibility that people he killed aren't actually dead anyway."
> 
> Warning for brief but graphically violent fantasies.

Patrick wakes up to a room full of dead women. No, that’s not quite right: dead men and women both, but mostly women. They are perfectly still and perfectly silent. It’s the stillness, the silence, that makes it clear that they’re not alive. No blinking. No breath drawn. 

He thinks first that he must be dreaming, but no: his alarm is still going off. There is an ache behind his eyes. He is awake. 

He shouts until he can no longer hear his alarm. It doesn’t matter, has never mattered, how much noise he makes. The neighbors have never complained before. Not even in the bleakest hours of the night. He yells, and they stare blankly, and then they’re gone, like a candle flame guttering out. 

Patrick shuts off his alarm, does his calisthenics, takes a shower, goes to work. He walks through the building more slowly than usual. He wants to assure himself that the people surrounding him are real, and alive. Blinking and breathing. He’s off-kilter, still jittery, but largely in control of himself by the time he gets to his own office.

“Morning, Jean,” he says. Only later, much later, he will realize that through force of habit he did not spare a glance toward her desk. He sees someone out of the corner of his eye sitting in her chair, and of course Jean is a constant. Jean is inviolate. He is so sure that his own actions would be the only thing to remove her from his daily routine—

Three hours later, there is a knock on his door. 

“Come in,” Patrick says. He doesn’t look up. 

“Hey, Pat,” Tim says. “We still on for lunch?”

“Sure,” Patrick says. “Fine.”

“Where’s that little dish who usually answers your phone, by the way?” Tim says. “Jane, or whatever.”

“Jean?” Patrick says. He frowns. “She was here this morning.” He looks up. There’s someone in the doorway just behind Tim. She doesn’t blink. She doesn’t move.

It isn’t Jean. 

“Jesus fucking Christ.”

“What?” Tim says. “What’d I say?” 

“Turn around,” Patrick says, but as Tim turns, the woman is gone. “Fuck.”

“I feel like there’s a joke I’m not in on,” Tim says. 

“Me too,” Patrick says. “I have to make some calls.”

“See you at 1:30,” Tim says. Patrick doesn’t say anything. He’s already dialing an extension.

Jean, he finds out, didn’t come in today. Family emergency. One of the general receptionists is fielding his calls remotely today. He thinks about a woman (blonde, small, and perfectly still) sitting outside his office for three hours. Looking in at him. Normally, he’d have an easy fix. Several ideas come to mind, unbidden, as they always do. It’s as natural to him now as breathing. 

( _Hands tight around her throat, knife buried in her gut, thumbs sinking into her eye sockets, fishhooks threaded through the lips of her cunt_ —which had she been? Any of them, all of them. It doesn’t matter.)

Patrick can’t remember her face, or the faces of any of the people who surrounded him first thing in the morning. Bodies are easier. 

And that’s the problem, really. How can you take apart something you can’t even touch?


End file.
